Zynga Talks Technology With zCloud

Zynga has shifted from having 80 percent of its games hosted on Amazon Web Services and 20 percent on their own servers, to 80 percent on their own zCloud and 20 percent on Amazon Web Services. Allan Leinwand, CTO of Zynga, indicates that this is a key part of the company’s success.

“We need to make our games accessible to millions of players, which requires an amazing amount of infrastructure,” said Leinwand. “We started by setting up our own servers, but back in 2009 FarmVille became wildly successful. In the first six weeks it went from 0 users to over 10 million daily users. That was a ramp that took a lot of people by surprise.”

“Social gaming is something that can take off quickly; FarmVille hit 25 million DAU in five months,” noted Leinwand. “We realized we couldn’t continue to scale up an infrastructure at that pace. So we ended up leveraging public cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services. We used the public cloud’s flexibility to really grow our games. In 2009 and through the middle of 2010, we would launch games in AWS and scale them up there. We had our private data centers and Amazon’s centers. Over the course of 2010 we started to change that, and grow a private cloud we called zCloud. We were really the first people to build a hybrid public-private cloud. We continued to build out zCloud over the course of 2011. zCloud feels a lot like Amazon Web Services.”